Information Sites


Information web sites receive anonymous user traffic. Unlike financial, B2B, or portal web sites, these sites don't require users to have an account with the site to make full use of its features. (e-Commerce sites also allow anonymous browsing, but generally require the user to create an account for purchases.) Examples of information sites include news, weather, entertainment, and major sports event web sites. These web sites focus on excellent response times and high throughput. These sites compete for advertising revenue; the more traffic they handle every day, the happier the advertisers. Advertising content sometimes comes from third-party sources, complicating the site's performance characteristics.

Caching Potential

Information web site caching resembles a hybrid between e-Commerce and portal caching. The pages returned contain graphic elements such as aesthetic graphics ( buttons , menu bars, and so on), advertisements, and often information graphics ( charts , news photos, and so on.). These sites cache their static elements and also frequently cache prebuilt dynamic pages. For example, news sites often cache their front page until the content changes. The site then builds the new page, and "pushes" it out to the cache.

The high-end information sites use very elaborate hardware configurations to route users to their nearest regional cluster. Within the cluster, the web site uses multiple servers and caches to handle user requests . In these cases, simultaneously updating the distributed machine cluster to give all your users consistent content often proves to be a significant challenge. The cache refresh rates vary depending on the information site's function. Large sports event sites refresh their caches continuously to reflect the latest scores. An entertainment site, however, probably reports accurate TV programming listings using only hourly, or even daily, cache refreshes.

Special Considerations: Traffic Patterns

Information web sites provide information. The largest considerations with these sites revolve around the "when" and "how" of information retrieval. Traffic patterns on information web sites vary widely depending on the site. In general, these sites receive most of their traffic throughout the business day with spikes during the lunch hours. However, if the site's information suddenly becomes more interesting, traffic volumes grow dramatically. Entertainment sites experience traffic spikes if a major celebrity makes headlines. Sports event sites receive potentially crushing loads of traffic during the actual event.

Since no traffic pattern fits all information sites, we typically look to the traffic handled by similar web sites for guidance when planning a test. Also, discuss traffic patterns with your marketing department to get more ideas. Finally, consider the information on your web site: Can you foresee any circumstances that would create unusually high demand for this information? If so, plan for this demand.

As we mentioned previously, many information sites now act as providers to other sites or portals. For many information web sites, the traffic generated by these sites far exceeds their usual traffic rates. If your site acts as a provider to other sites, the traffic patterns of those sites become your traffic patterns as well. Make your capacity and test plans fit the projected peak loads of sites using your content.

Performance Testing an Information Site

Information web site performance testing focuses on throughput and response time. User visits tend to be very brief at such sites, unlike visits to other web sites, and require little or no HTTP session information. Web sites fitting this pattern make good candidates for think time reduction within the test client, which reduces the number of user licenses actually required to stress the system. (See Chapter 6 for more details.)



Performance Analysis for Java Web Sites
Performance Analysis for Javaв„ў Websites
ISBN: 0201844540
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 126

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